Israel stated on Tuesday that it regretted the killing of a Palestinian judge working in Jordan who was gunned down by Israeli soldiers at a border crossing on Monday. Mere hours earlier, the Israeli military had branded him a ‘terrorist’.

“Israel regrets the death of Judge Raed Zeiter yesterday at
the King Hussein (Allenby) bridge and expresses its sympathies to
the people and government of Jordan,” Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement released on
Tuesday.

Thirty-eight-year-old Palestinian-born Judge Raed Zeiter was shot
down allegedly after a confrontation with Israeli soldiers at a
border crossing between Jordan and the occupied West Bank. He had
been employed as a judge in an Amman magistrates court, and had a
wife and two children.

Netanyahu’s office promised that there would be a joint
investigation into his death along with Jordan, and expressed its
ongoing commitment to its peace agreement with the country. The
incident fell at a delicate moment as the US seeks Jordan’s
support for fraught Israeli-Palestine peace talks.

Shortly after the incident, demonstrators assembled outside the
Israeli Embassy in Amman, Jordan, according to Haaretz.
Simultaneously, the Jordanian government dispatched a
strongly-worded message to Israel protesting the incident.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh convened with an Israeli
diplomat and lambasted the killing, according to Petra, the
Jordanian state news agency. Judeh reportedly demanded an
investigation.

Prior to the apology by Netanyahu’s office, the Israeli military
had released a statement denouncing Zeiter as a
“terrorist”. They alleged that he had attempted to seize
one of their weapons.

Later, an official in Amman told Reuters that he thought that
Zeiter had been gunned down by a ‘trigger-happy young soldier’
who had been coercing passengers onto a bus at Allenby, and it
was this which caused the altercation.

“Raed and the soldier quarreled for some reason that I did
not understand and pushed one another ... I got onto the bus and
a minute later I heard one gun shot followed by three
shots,” Mohammed Sharif Zaid, a 34-year-old West Bank
merchant told the agency.

“From the Israeli account, we think there was an altercation
and the (soldiers) hit him and pushed him to the floor. His
dignity could not accept the humiliation and insult,” said
the judge's father, Alaa Zeiter.

Zeiter was buried in the West Bank city of Nablus on Tuesday,
wrapped in a Palestinian flag and a Jordanian flag, according to
Reuters. There was no surveillance footage to confirm eyewitness
testimony pertaining to the disagreement.

In an unrelated incident, a 20-year-old Palestinian was gunned
down in the West Bank on the same day. The Israeli military
claimed he was throwing rocks at Israeli vehicles.

“A Palestinian was injured and later died of his wounds. The
Military Police Corps has opened an investigation concerning the
incident,” the military said.

However, the man's relatives said he had been shot while tending
his family's goats near his home. This was later confirmed by the
governor of nearby Ramallah.

In February, Amnesty International released a report stating that
Israel’s armed forces were taking excessive measures in the West
Bank, with the violence killing dozens of Palestinians over the
past three years. Amnesty stated that Israeli actions could even
be regarded as a war crime. The Israeli army said they were
responding to a rise in Palestinian violence.